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[GIMP] Small Village on Parchment

Hello!

This is my second attempt to draw a town for a role playing game session. I'm trying to just do a quiky, as always; not a masterpiece of which you all are capable! I want it to look like quill and ink on parchment. I'm completely unskilled at anything art related and I'm using my finger on the touchpad of my laptop to freehand this! XD

Not sure how I'm going to do the buildings. I may use the square select, then fill solid black, then rotate and drag and drop. Slow, but this is a small village.

Any tips or examples of this type of map?

Thanks!

Also, I just noticed that the very top of my map is screwed up. Don't know why.

EDIT: Figured out why. There was no black in the channel to blur into the paper layer...

Found this map by searching for "village map on parchment" using Google's image search. It's a perfect example of the look I'm seeking, but the city is much, much larger. I probably won't draw "roads" on my map; they will be implied by the rows of gaps between the buildings. There won't be a wall around the town, either.

I'll be replacing some of the square buildings with 'L'-shaped ones to change it up a bit. I'm just going right along, hand-drawing the buildings, rotating them, then pasting them where I want them. It's probably asinine to do it that way, but...

Anyone have a link to a good quill-type font that would be good for this? Thanks.

Can't help you on the font but wanted to offer some encouragement: It's looking good and the way you're doing the buildings is turning out just fine. I have done buildings this way in the past with good results.

You might want to take a look at the current lite mapping challenge - there is a sheet of building shapes that might work out well for this map. I'm assuming it's okay to use them for this but you might want to check. If not you can easily make more complex shapes just as you have done...combining rectangles and other shapes and then rotating the finished building shape into place.

Once you get done placing all of the buildings you could have a go at stylising them. Put all of the buildings into one layer (or group them into several layers if you want different styles) and then apply some sort of effect to them. For instance, you could set fill to 0% and put an outline around them. Or you could run a bevel, find edges, to get shaped roofs. Lots of options here. Take a look at my Finished Maps links to see some of the ways I've manipulated filled shapes to get finished buildings (though none of the styles I have there really apply to your ink-on-parchment look).